Lie to Me, "Black Friday": Two good cases

"Lie to Me."As mentioned previously, "Lie to Me"
is a show that, due to its nature, I'm not going to blog about every
week, but tonight's episode was a pretty strong one, and I want to talk
briefly about why. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I run away to
that place where all the cool teenagers hide out...

"Lie to Me" showrunner Shawn Ryan told me
at the start of the season that he wanted to focus on character first
and the science second, and that he felt the stories would have more
impact if there weren't always so many of them per episode. "Black
Friday," though, managed to spend roughly equal time on two stories
without one diminishing the other, and it managed to work in a fair bit
of the science without it feeling like it came at the expense of the
characters.

Tim Roth is still reasons #1-17 for watching this
show, but it's important to develop the other characters, both as foils
for Lightman and so the B-stories are interesting even when they're
Lightman-lite. The Black Friday story did a good job of setting up
Loker and Torres on opposite sides of the issue, and having Loker do
the right thing not because he's necessarily a good guy, but because of
the (mostly) inflexible moral code he's set up for himself.

The
highlight, though, was Lightman taking the kidnapped boy through the
looking glass, and the problem getting increasingly messy as it went
along. In that way, it felt like one of the better episodes of "House,"
only instead of one misdiagnosis after another, we got one incorrect
set of parents after another, and the final one was so damaged that the
kid started to regret looking at all.

"Lie to Me" isn't a
straight crime procedural, but it can be close enough that I appreciate
episodes like this one that deny you the pat ending. The electronics
store will still make a payout, but people are still dead and they
probably should be paying more. And the kid finds his biological
father, but all four living parties are all so damaged by the
experience that they may never put themselves back together again - or
maybe they will. (All of this, of course, depends on what kind of time,
if any, the adoptive parents have to serve.)

Strong outing.
Again, I don't have a lot of room in my life for standalone dramas, but
episodes like this remind me why I make an exception for "Lie to Me."